DEVELOPMENT OF MULTICRITERIA MODEL TO SELECT EFFICIENT RENEWABLE BASED DESALINATION TECHNOLOGY AT REMOTE AREAS IN ANDHRA PRADESH – INDIA

This paper highlights the need for desalination plants and selection of efficient renewable based desalination technology to treat brackish water in villages near coastal regions in Andhra Pradesh. It assumes tremendous significance as supply of potable drinking water in villages, throughout the year, is emerging as one of the major challenges to the government in the backdrop of escalating population and frequent drought-like conditions. In wake of this, unfiltered ground water is being utilised for direct consumption due to high costs of purification. Setting up of desalination plants to treat brackish water would augment conventional sources to supply drinking water at low cost. This paper presents a multi criteria assessment model to select an efficient renewable based desalination technology for the given conditions for sustainable development to reduce fossil fuel dependency. PROMETHEE-2 and Comprise programming were identified as the appropriate multi criteria evaluation techniques and five alternatives were evaluated using these methods separately. The respective results indicate the photo voltaic electro dialysis (PV-ED) was the most applicable technology for the given conditions and ranked the usage of photo voltaic reverse osmosis(PV-RO), wind reverse osmosis (Wind-RO),solar multi effect distillation(Solar-MED), wind mechanical vapor compression(Wind MVC)